Category: Religion

Sunday’s Sermon: Water Into Wine

John 2:1-11

Introduction
In my first appointment as a minister I followed a man who
would not drink tea or coffee – and yes, he was a Methodist, not a Mormon. In
my last appointment I worked alongside an Anglican minister who not only did
not drink either tea or coffee, he only drank cold water. Imagine my
astonishment once when he came to my manse and was willing to drink squash.
Robinson’s Fruits Of The Forest Barley Water, if I remember correctly.

Either to succeed the first minister or work in the same
church as the second minister meant that when people asked me what I would like
to drink, they had to broach the ‘tea or coffee’ question in hushed tones, much
like Methodists used to be asked whether they drank alcohol.

All of which leads to our Gospel account of Jesus turning
water into wine. I have heard it sincerely argued that Jesus must have turned
the water into non-alcoholic wine. That would be very convenient, but it has no
basis in fact. Having said that,

‘[W]ine in the ancient world was
diluted with water to between one-third and one-tenth of its fermented
strength, i.e. something less strong
than American beer. Undiluted wine, about the strength of wine today, was
viewed as ‘strong drink’, and earned much more disapprobation.’
[D A Carson, The Gospel According To John,
p 169.]

Against the fact of weaker wine should be set the fact that
it was a hot climate and you would not need such strong alcohol for there to be
an effect on the human body.

But we can’t just use this story to argue for or against
teetotalism. Just to deal with that quickly, it is often argued that because
alcohol is abused in our society all Christians should abstain from it.
However, not only did Jesus not abstain, there are other things that are
misused in our culture and we biblically would not expect all Christians to go
without. Often these are good aspects of God’s creation that are to be received
with thanksgiving. The obvious example is sex. It is reduced to an animal
passion and a commodity in our world, but it is also part of God’s design for
marriage. So I would conclude that the misuse of alcohol is a reason for some Christians to abstain as a witness
that you do not need it in order to live a happy and fulfilled life, but it is
not an argument for every Christian to do so.

At the same time, that is not an argument for licence. For
those of us whose conscience allows us to drink, then we need to remember that
the fruit of the Spirit includes self-control. When I was a young Christian in
my twenties I found nothing more embarrassing than having to drive drunken
Christians home from parties.

However, as I said, this story is not there to be the
grounds for a debate about Christian faith and alcohol. John has a specific
reason for including it. He says in verse 11 that this is the first of Jesus’ signs that revealed his glory. John has
seven ‘signs’.

Now if they are not just miracles but signs, then they point
somewhere. They point to Jesus. And so like any sign, we need to ask what they
mean. We also need to know their purpose. And we need to think about our
response. We do this with road signs. We see the number ‘30’ in a circle. We
know its meaning: do not exceed thirty miles per hour. We know its purpose: road
safety. And we know what our response should be: obey it. Perhaps at Broomfield are very
conscious of this, with the speed camera outside the church building!

We can apply the same three areas of exploration to the
miraculous signs of Jesus: what do they mean? What is their purpose? And how
should we respond?

1. Meaning
Why does Jesus turn the water into wine? Is it to help the
poor bridegroom out of a socially embarrassing corner? Is it to help the chief
steward? Is Jesus connected with one or other of the families (and hence the
invitation that includes him and his mother)? If so, perhaps this constitutes
his wedding present to the couple. It’s a very generous one if it is: between
one hundred and twenty and one hundred and eighty gallons of wine. One thing is
for sure, you’d be happy to have Jesus as a guest at your party on this
evidence!

But there has to be more. In John’s Gospel it usually pays
to get beyond the surface meaning. Not without cause has it been dubbed ‘the
spiritual Gospel’. And I believe the clue comes in the water jars that were
used. John tells us they were ‘for the Jewish rites of purification’ (verse 6).
They may have been on hand for the ritual washing of utensils and of guests’
hands [Carson,
p 173]. But the water of Jewish purification is transformed by Jesus into the
new wine. It is a sign of the Gospel.

In other words, this miracle points us away from the
observation of outwardly-observed rules to the inner transformation brought by
Christ through the Cross, Resurrection and gift of the Holy Spirit. And
although Jesus tells his mother that ‘[his] hour has not yet come’ (verse 4) –
that is, the hour of the Cross – the wine instead of water points to all that
he would accomplish at his appointed hour of redemptive suffering.

Or put it another way: one thing John omits from his Gospel
is the institution of the Lord’s Supper. There is no account of Jesus telling
his disciples that the Passover bread is his body and the wine is his blood.
But in this story, while the wine is not his blood, the wine of the miracle
foretells his blood. Here, so early in his Gospel John is dropping hints of the
Cross. He will give half his Gospel to Holy Week, the Cross and the
Resurrection. But here, near the beginning, this first sign has the meaning of
pointing to his ‘hour’ of destiny and the transformation it will bring.

This is the sense in which you want Jesus at your party. In
this miracle he gives advance notice of the great party of all time, the
messianic banquet, where the blood of the Cross leads to the wine of the
kingdom via the forgiveness of sins, the conquest of evil, the gift of new life
and the power of the Spirit.

Some years ago Tony
Campolo wrote a book whose title encapsulates this: The
Kingdom Of God Is A Party. You’d expect wine and a party. For the
Christian, without wishing to sound irreverent at all, the blood of the Cross,
which leads us to the new wine of the kingdom, is grounds for a party. The
Cross is not meant to turn Christians into miseries – we do a pretty good job
of that without any help, thank you – it is the reason for humble celebration.

2. Purpose
As a child I used to read weekly a magazine called ‘Tell Me
Why’. It satisfied my curiosity with the world and explained all sorts of
fascinating scientific facts to children. I am now the father of a not-yet
four-year-old daughter whose favourite question is ‘Why?’ She can ask ‘Why?’
with what seems like infinite regression in an argument. My brain hurts by the
end of the conversation and I resort to the usual parental ‘Because I say so’
answer more times than I care to admit.

Thankfully the ‘Why?’ question about this sign is answered
for us by John. It comes in his comment at the end of the story:

Jesus did this, the first of his signs,
in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
(verse 11)

‘The first of his signs’; he ‘revealed his glory’; ‘and his
disciples believed in him.’

The first of his signs – first not just in the sense of
chronological order, but perhaps even the primary sign, the one that shows God
is bringing about a new creation.

And a sign that reveals his glory. His glory would most
clearly be revealed on the Cross, but the glory of his grace and truth were
seeping out before then. Not everyone saw it that way. Just because he
performed a sign such as this that revealed his glory didn’t mean that everyone
received it that way. When he fed the five thousand (John 6) the crowd didn’t
take it as a reason to become his disciples; they were happy to have their
stomachs filled and think that he was the one who would do exactly what they
wanted as the hoped for political and military messiah. They saw the sign, but
not his glory.

And perhaps it was like this at the wedding. We do not read
of the bride and groom or any of their guests wanting to follow him as a result
of turning water into wine. They are happy to have their physical needs met,
too. It’s enough to take what Jesus gives.

But Jesus’ disciples see not only the sign, they glimpse his
glory too, and they believe in him. This is the purpose of the sign – that
people have the opportunity to perceive the glory of Jesus and believe in him.

In other words, Jesus didn’t simply do this to make the
party go with a swing and get the bridegroom out of social shame and
embarrassment, much as he clearly was one who enjoyed socialising to the point
that in contrast to John the Baptist his critics called him ‘a glutton and a
drunkard’. Whatever needs his signs met out of compassion, Jesus had a further
agenda. His glory was seeping out through the cracks of the sign for those who
had eyes to see, and if you caught even some squint of his blazing glory then
you would put your faith in him. You would entrust your life to him.

And that is the challenge for us and for others: where have
we seen Jesus do something wonderful? Do we just want whatever is in it for
ourselves or are we prepared to be dazzled by his glory? And if we are, will we
put our lives in his hands and follow him? 
The sign asks us not just what we want from Jesus but challenges us
about what Jesus wants from us.

Which leads us to the third point:

3. Response
A few decades ago there was a South African Pentecostal
minister called David du Plessis who did a lot of costly ecumenical work to
bridge the gaps between his Christian traditions and others who had ostracised
the Pentecostals, and whom the Pentecostals equally had scorned.

On one occasion he was with a group of Roman Catholics. They
had found a lot in common, but then someone said there must be some things they
disagreed on. What did he think about the Virgin Mary?

“I obey her,” he replied.

That wasn’t quite the reply they were expecting, not from a
member of a hardline Protestant tradition.

“What do you mean, you obey her? How can you say that?”
asked the Catholics.

“John chapter two, the wedding at Cana,”
said du Plessis. Mary told the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ So I obey
Mary: I do whatever her Son tells me.”

And there is the response of believing faith to which we are
called: do whatever he tells you. When Jesus’ signs mean we can celebrate his
work and respond to what we see of his glory by putting our faith in him, what
that boils down to is obedient faith:
do whatever he tells you.

Do we know where specifically Jesus is challenging us to
that response to his work right now? I think I know where it is for me. A
couple of weeks ago I got a phone call from someone who is not a churchgoer
with a particular problem that needed a minister. Naturally I can’t talk
publicly about the nature of the person’s circumstances, but it is enough to
say that it was a situation that was way outside my fourteen years’ experience
as a minister, and it was something that I felt really uncomfortable about
getting involved with. I wanted to bail out. I certainly don’t believe in being
a hero who goes in out of his depth or beyond his gifting.

But rather than let me bail out God has rather directed me
to other ministers with experience in this area who are coming alongside me in
helping this person. Every phone call, every email and every visit are times
when I have to be dragged almost kicking and screaming still to play my part in
helping this person. All sorts of irrational fears come into my consciousness
from my warped imagination. When different friends give conflicting advice that
becomes another reason I want to say, ‘Enough!’ and hand this over to someone
else.

But Jesus keeps asking me to take one more step. And however
reluctantly, I keep doing so. Not so much giant strides as pigeon steps.
Somewhere in this I believe Jesus will do something beautiful for the person
who called me. I’d like to think something good will come out of it for me,
too. But that cannot be my primary concern. I am called to obedience because
Jesus has done wonderful things for me, and because he also does wonderful
things when we obey him. You know, water into wine or something similar.

So where has our experience of Christ led us? To the filling
of our stomachs or a woozy feeling in our heads, because we’ve taken what he’s
given us and no more? Or have our eyes seen his glory? And if so, have we
responded with obedient faith? And not only have
we responded, are we responding even
now and doing whatever he tells us?

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Sunday’s Sermon: Water Into Wine

John 2:1-11

Introduction
In my first appointment as a minister I followed a man who
would not drink tea or coffee – and yes, he was a Methodist, not a Mormon. In
my last appointment I worked alongside an Anglican minister who not only did
not drink either tea or coffee, he only drank cold water. Imagine my
astonishment once when he came to my manse and was willing to drink squash.
Robinson’s Fruits Of The Forest Barley Water, if I remember correctly.

Either to succeed the first minister or work in the same
church as the second minister meant that when people asked me what I would like
to drink, they had to broach the ‘tea or coffee’ question in hushed tones, much
like Methodists used to be asked whether they drank alcohol.

All of which leads to our Gospel account of Jesus turning
water into wine. I have heard it sincerely argued that Jesus must have turned
the water into non-alcoholic wine. That would be very convenient, but it has no
basis in fact. Having said that,

‘[W]ine in the ancient world was
diluted with water to between one-third and one-tenth of its fermented
strength, i.e. something less strong
than American beer. Undiluted wine, about the strength of wine today, was
viewed as ‘strong drink’, and earned much more disapprobation.’
[D A Carson, The Gospel According To John,
p 169.]

Against the fact of weaker wine should be set the fact that
it was a hot climate and you would not need such strong alcohol for there to be
an effect on the human body.

But we can’t just use this story to argue for or against
teetotalism. Just to deal with that quickly, it is often argued that because
alcohol is abused in our society all Christians should abstain from it.
However, not only did Jesus not abstain, there are other things that are
misused in our culture and we biblically would not expect all Christians to go
without. Often these are good aspects of God’s creation that are to be received
with thanksgiving. The obvious example is sex. It is reduced to an animal
passion and a commodity in our world, but it is also part of God’s design for
marriage. So I would conclude that the misuse of alcohol is a reason for some Christians to abstain as a witness
that you do not need it in order to live a happy and fulfilled life, but it is
not an argument for every Christian to do so.

At the same time, that is not an argument for licence. For
those of us whose conscience allows us to drink, then we need to remember that
the fruit of the Spirit includes self-control. When I was a young Christian in
my twenties I found nothing more embarrassing than having to drive drunken
Christians home from parties.

However, as I said, this story is not there to be the
grounds for a debate about Christian faith and alcohol. John has a specific
reason for including it. He says in verse 11 that this is the first of Jesus’ signs that revealed his glory. John has
seven ‘signs’.

Now if they are not just miracles but signs, then they point
somewhere. They point to Jesus. And so like any sign, we need to ask what they
mean. We also need to know their purpose. And we need to think about our
response. We do this with road signs. We see the number ‘30’ in a circle. We
know its meaning: do not exceed thirty miles per hour. We know its purpose: road
safety. And we know what our response should be: obey it. Perhaps at Broomfield are very
conscious of this, with the speed camera outside the church building!

We can apply the same three areas of exploration to the
miraculous signs of Jesus: what do they mean? What is their purpose? And how
should we respond?

1. Meaning
Why does Jesus turn the water into wine? Is it to help the
poor bridegroom out of a socially embarrassing corner? Is it to help the chief
steward? Is Jesus connected with one or other of the families (and hence the
invitation that includes him and his mother)? If so, perhaps this constitutes
his wedding present to the couple. It’s a very generous one if it is: between
one hundred and twenty and one hundred and eighty gallons of wine. One thing is
for sure, you’d be happy to have Jesus as a guest at your party on this
evidence!

But there has to be more. In John’s Gospel it usually pays
to get beyond the surface meaning. Not without cause has it been dubbed ‘the
spiritual Gospel’. And I believe the clue comes in the water jars that were
used. John tells us they were ‘for the Jewish rites of purification’ (verse 6).
They may have been on hand for the ritual washing of utensils and of guests’
hands [Carson,
p 173]. But the water of Jewish purification is transformed by Jesus into the
new wine. It is a sign of the Gospel.

In other words, this miracle points us away from the
observation of outwardly-observed rules to the inner transformation brought by
Christ through the Cross, Resurrection and gift of the Holy Spirit. And
although Jesus tells his mother that ‘[his] hour has not yet come’ (verse 4) –
that is, the hour of the Cross – the wine instead of water points to all that
he would accomplish at his appointed hour of redemptive suffering.

Or put it another way: one thing John omits from his Gospel
is the institution of the Lord’s Supper. There is no account of Jesus telling
his disciples that the Passover bread is his body and the wine is his blood.
But in this story, while the wine is not his blood, the wine of the miracle
foretells his blood. Here, so early in his Gospel John is dropping hints of the
Cross. He will give half his Gospel to Holy Week, the Cross and the
Resurrection. But here, near the beginning, this first sign has the meaning of
pointing to his ‘hour’ of destiny and the transformation it will bring.

This is the sense in which you want Jesus at your party. In
this miracle he gives advance notice of the great party of all time, the
messianic banquet, where the blood of the Cross leads to the wine of the
kingdom via the forgiveness of sins, the conquest of evil, the gift of new life
and the power of the Spirit.

Some years ago Tony
Campolo wrote a book whose title encapsulates this: The
Kingdom Of God Is A Party. You’d expect wine and a party. For the
Christian, without wishing to sound irreverent at all, the blood of the Cross,
which leads us to the new wine of the kingdom, is grounds for a party. The
Cross is not meant to turn Christians into miseries – we do a pretty good job
of that without any help, thank you – it is the reason for humble celebration.

2. Purpose
As a child I used to read weekly a magazine called ‘Tell Me
Why’. It satisfied my curiosity with the world and explained all sorts of
fascinating scientific facts to children. I am now the father of a not-yet
four-year-old daughter whose favourite question is ‘Why?’ She can ask ‘Why?’
with what seems like infinite regression in an argument. My brain hurts by the
end of the conversation and I resort to the usual parental ‘Because I say so’
answer more times than I care to admit.

Thankfully the ‘Why?’ question about this sign is answered
for us by John. It comes in his comment at the end of the story:

Jesus did this, the first of his signs,
in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
(verse 11)

‘The first of his signs’; he ‘revealed his glory’; ‘and his
disciples believed in him.’

The first of his signs – first not just in the sense of
chronological order, but perhaps even the primary sign, the one that shows God
is bringing about a new creation.

And a sign that reveals his glory. His glory would most
clearly be revealed on the Cross, but the glory of his grace and truth were
seeping out before then. Not everyone saw it that way. Just because he
performed a sign such as this that revealed his glory didn’t mean that everyone
received it that way. When he fed the five thousand (John 6) the crowd didn’t
take it as a reason to become his disciples; they were happy to have their
stomachs filled and think that he was the one who would do exactly what they
wanted as the hoped for political and military messiah. They saw the sign, but
not his glory.

And perhaps it was like this at the wedding. We do not read
of the bride and groom or any of their guests wanting to follow him as a result
of turning water into wine. They are happy to have their physical needs met,
too. It’s enough to take what Jesus gives.

But Jesus’ disciples see not only the sign, they glimpse his
glory too, and they believe in him. This is the purpose of the sign – that
people have the opportunity to perceive the glory of Jesus and believe in him.

In other words, Jesus didn’t simply do this to make the
party go with a swing and get the bridegroom out of social shame and
embarrassment, much as he clearly was one who enjoyed socialising to the point
that in contrast to John the Baptist his critics called him ‘a glutton and a
drunkard’. Whatever needs his signs met out of compassion, Jesus had a further
agenda. His glory was seeping out through the cracks of the sign for those who
had eyes to see, and if you caught even some squint of his blazing glory then
you would put your faith in him. You would entrust your life to him.

And that is the challenge for us and for others: where have
we seen Jesus do something wonderful? Do we just want whatever is in it for
ourselves or are we prepared to be dazzled by his glory? And if we are, will we
put our lives in his hands and follow him? 
The sign asks us not just what we want from Jesus but challenges us
about what Jesus wants from us.

Which leads us to the third point:

3. Response
A few decades ago there was a South African Pentecostal
minister called David du Plessis who did a lot of costly ecumenical work to
bridge the gaps between his Christian traditions and others who had ostracised
the Pentecostals, and whom the Pentecostals equally had scorned.

On one occasion he was with a group of Roman Catholics. They
had found a lot in common, but then someone said there must be some things they
disagreed on. What did he think about the Virgin Mary?

“I obey her,” he replied.

That wasn’t quite the reply they were expecting, not from a
member of a hardline Protestant tradition.

“What do you mean, you obey her? How can you say that?”
asked the Catholics.

“John chapter two, the wedding at Cana,”
said du Plessis. Mary told the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ So I obey
Mary: I do whatever her Son tells me.”

And there is the response of believing faith to which we are
called: do whatever he tells you. When Jesus’ signs mean we can celebrate his
work and respond to what we see of his glory by putting our faith in him, what
that boils down to is obedient faith:
do whatever he tells you.

Do we know where specifically Jesus is challenging us to
that response to his work right now? I think I know where it is for me. A
couple of weeks ago I got a phone call from someone who is not a churchgoer
with a particular problem that needed a minister. Naturally I can’t talk
publicly about the nature of the person’s circumstances, but it is enough to
say that it was a situation that was way outside my fourteen years’ experience
as a minister, and it was something that I felt really uncomfortable about
getting involved with. I wanted to bail out. I certainly don’t believe in being
a hero who goes in out of his depth or beyond his gifting.

But rather than let me bail out God has rather directed me
to other ministers with experience in this area who are coming alongside me in
helping this person. Every phone call, every email and every visit are times
when I have to be dragged almost kicking and screaming still to play my part in
helping this person. All sorts of irrational fears come into my consciousness
from my warped imagination. When different friends give conflicting advice that
becomes another reason I want to say, ‘Enough!’ and hand this over to someone
else.

But Jesus keeps asking me to take one more step. And however
reluctantly, I keep doing so. Not so much giant strides as pigeon steps.
Somewhere in this I believe Jesus will do something beautiful for the person
who called me. I’d like to think something good will come out of it for me,
too. But that cannot be my primary concern. I am called to obedience because
Jesus has done wonderful things for me, and because he also does wonderful
things when we obey him. You know, water into wine or something similar.

So where has our experience of Christ led us? To the filling
of our stomachs or a woozy feeling in our heads, because we’ve taken what he’s
given us and no more? Or have our eyes seen his glory? And if so, have we
responded with obedient faith? And not only have
we responded, are we responding even
now and doing whatever he tells us?

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Covenant Sunday Sermon: More Than A Resolution

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Introduction
It’s New Year and the same companies that encouraged self-indulgence before Christmas now want us to make New Year Resolutions. So Boots, who told us Christmas was all about making ourselves look gorgeous, have now re-launched their ‘Change One Thing’ campaign. Knowing that sixty per cent of those who make resolutions break them within a fortnight because their targets are too ambitious or too complicated, Change One Thing encourages a simple and manageable improvement to people’s lives. They encourage you to ‘pledge, plan and persist’.

If we think of the Methodist Covenant Service as in any way being like a spiritual New Year’s Resolution then we may think that it calls us not to one simple and manageable target but sets the goal so high we know we are going to miss it. It’s only a matter of time.

So it would be tempting to change our Covenant Service prayer and make it the religious equivalent of Change One Thing. But we don’t. We leave the bar high. Doesn’t that make what we are going to do today a counsel of despair or an exercise in hypocrisy? Not if we look at what God promises first in his covenant with us. And for that I want to take us to the traditional reading from Jeremiah. We’ll explore the nature of God’s covenant with us. Because our covenant is but a response to all he does for us. What is in his covenant? How does it help us to make or renew our commitment to him? And in particular, how is the New Covenant better than the Old Covenant? Because one thing is for sure: Israel broke the Old Covenant much like we break New Year Resolutions. If we can see the differences we may be able to see our way forward with God in faithfulness and holiness.

1. Redemption

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord.

(verses 31-32)

The problem with the Old Covenant wasn’t with God. It was with God’s people. God didn’t break the Old Covenant. His people did. And it’s a tragedy, because of what the Old Covenant gave them. And the New Covenant cannot be inferior: it is better. It includes all the best that God gave in the Old Covenant and more.

In particular, the Old Covenant began with redemption. He ‘took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt’ (verse 32). Before anything else, God saved his people from the oppression of Egypt. The commands of his covenant were only ever given after they had been delivered. So the Ten Commandments are given at Sinai, after their salvation at the Red Sea. God’s commands are only ever to be obeyed in response to and gratitude for what he has done for us.

So even now, when God makes a New Covenant with his people, it will still at the bottom line include redemption – being set free. Whereas before it involved liberation from Egypt it would now include being set free from Babylon and in due course under Jesus Christ would involve redemption from sin.

And so that is where the New Covenant begins for us. It begins with the liberating news that Jesus Christ in his death on the Cross offers the forgiveness of sins to all who trust their lives to him. It is the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. It is what Matt Redman has recently dubbed ‘Beautiful News’. He says,

We live in a culture marked by bad news. You only need flick through the news channels for a few moments to be faced with all kinds of negative or alarming news. The wonderful thing about the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it’s an altogether different kind of message. It’s ‘beautiful news’, refreshing to the soul and full hope, joy and peace.

Beautiful news – redemption – is the beginning of God’s covenant relationship with us. It is what he offers to us in Christ before we ever do anything for him. Our covenant responsibility is to respond to this love and grace with grateful hearts who love to do the will of the One who has redeemed us at immense personal cost.

The danger is in the wrong kind of response, and I can think of two. One would be just to take redemption for granted and go on living the same selfish lives. That in essence is how Israel broke the Old Covenant. It is a response that does not truly receive what God has done for us.

The other danger would be to respond but in the feeble strength of our own human efforts. And that is where we need to move from Old Covenant to New Covenant. That is where New Covenant is better than Old. So if we move on to the second and third themes of God’s work in the Covenant that I want to reflect on I hope we’ll see how it’s possible to live in response to his gracious salvation.

2. Renewal

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

(verse 33)

The law of God within us, written on our hearts by God. What a contrast with the Old Covenant where the law of God was written externally on tablets of stone. Now the word is within. God is at work within his people. No longer is he working outside his people to bring salvation and declare his law; he is bringing his transforming power to work within his people.

And for this reason I call this aspect of the New Covenant ‘renewal’. In New Testament terms this is the work of the Holy Spirit. God not only redeems us in Christ and shows us the lifestyle that would please him as a response; he does more. His Spirit takes his word and puts it within us, making it part of us. It is no longer an external standard to be attained; it is part of what God is making us to be as he restores his image in us and makes us more like Christ.

Yes, here is the work of the Holy Spirit. That great twentieth century American saint A W Tozer used to say that the Spirit-filled life was not a deluxe form of Christianity for first-class Christian; it was the birthright of every Christian. Covenant Sunday is a day to remember that. Today is a day to say, ‘Come, Holy Spirit.’ Today is not a day to look back on past glories of previous spiritual mountain-top experiences and bask in sepia-tinted nostalgic light. Today is an occasion to take stock of where we are spiritually now. Whether we have known great past spiritual triumphs or whether we have never truly known the Spirit-filled life, on Covenant Sunday we all cry, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill us with your presence as the Father promises in the New Covenant. Come fill us, because without you we cannot adequately respond to God’s gracious work of salvation in Christ. Come fill us, because we long to show our gratitude for the love of God with lives overflowing with divine love.’

Some find this offensive. It may offend their pride, but that is what the Gospel does. It offends our pride. Everything we do of worth in the Christian life is given to us by God. It is not from our own hand.

Others are offended, because an earlier spiritual experience is not enough. This was the criticism brought against the nineteenth century revivalist D L Moody, when he preached once on Ephesians 5:18, which says, ‘Be filled with the Spirit.’ Moody correctly pointed out that the original Greek implies a translation of ‘Continue to be filled with the Spirit.’

One vicar objected to Moody’s teaching. ‘Why do I need to be filled with the Spirit again when I received the Holy Spirit at conversion?’ he complained.

‘Because,’ said Moody, ‘I leak.’

And we leak, too. Covenant Sunday may well be an occasion when we are conscious of the leakage, and that we have not lived up to our promises of last year. This may be at the forefront of our minds as we come in confession. But the Spirit is promised in the New Covenant. The Spirit is promised so that we can make a pleasing offering to God. So let us ask for more of the Holy Spirit with confidence that the Father will delight in our prayer and answer.

3. Relationship

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

(verse 34)

In some Christian circles there is a lot of cheesy talk about the Gospel meaning that people can have ‘a personal relationship with Jesus Christ’. It can sound like the Beautiful News is reduced to a cosmic mateyness. But however crassly it can be presented it remains at the heart of the Gospel: the New Covenant invites us into a personal relationship with the Almighty. ‘No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord,’ says our text. All within the Covenant shall know the Lord.

What we are called into is not religion – a set of rules and rituals with a belief in the existence of God. We are called into a relationship. God is so intent on breaking down the barriers that he ‘will forgive [our] iniquity, and remember [our] sin no more.’ His Son went to the Cross that we might know him personally. He sent his Spirit so that we might live to please him and reflect Christ.

No, the New Covenant brings us into personal relationship with God where we know him. It is why each of us can approach him in prayer, thanks to the Cross. It is no longer true that prayer is the preserve of specialists. All have an audience with the King, thanks to Christ’s work. It is not simply that we talk to the Father but that he talks to us. We hear his word and respond. Preachers and Bible teachers may help in understanding that word, but there is no papacy of scholars who are the only ones truly to understand the divine message. It is open to all who put their faith in Christ and become his disciples.

How does that enable us to respond with greater fidelity to the challenges of entering into a covenant with God? Like this: it is a personal relationship because it is about love. Our response – as well as being enabled by the renewing power of the Holy Spirit – is also the response of relationship. It is the reply of love answering love.

So it isn’t the following of rules. It isn’t cold, deadly obligation. It’s an affair of the heart. A heart set free by divine redemption and renewed in the image of Christ by the Holy Spirit wants to express love, gratitude and devotion to the One who brought about redemption.

And that’s what we’re about today. What God has done in Christ is so immense, so universe-shattering that we are not interested in tired old New Year Resolutions. Our answer is the reply of Covenant to his Covenant. And he who has redeemed us makes it possible for us to do so. This is the New Covenant.

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Covenant Sunday Sermon: More Than A Resolution

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Introduction
It’s New Year and the same companies that encouraged self-indulgence before Christmas now want us to make New Year Resolutions. So Boots, who told us Christmas was all about making ourselves look gorgeous, have now re-launched their ‘Change One Thing’ campaign. Knowing that sixty per cent of those who make resolutions break them within a fortnight because their targets are too ambitious or too complicated, Change One Thing encourages a simple and manageable improvement to people’s lives. They encourage you to ‘pledge, plan and persist’.

If we think of the Methodist Covenant Service as in any way being like a spiritual New Year’s Resolution then we may think that it calls us not to one simple and manageable target but sets the goal so high we know we are going to miss it. It’s only a matter of time.

So it would be tempting to change our Covenant Service prayer and make it the religious equivalent of Change One Thing. But we don’t. We leave the bar high. Doesn’t that make what we are going to do today a counsel of despair or an exercise in hypocrisy? Not if we look at what God promises first in his covenant with us. And for that I want to take us to the traditional reading from Jeremiah. We’ll explore the nature of God’s covenant with us. Because our covenant is but a response to all he does for us. What is in his covenant? How does it help us to make or renew our commitment to him? And in particular, how is the New Covenant better than the Old Covenant? Because one thing is for sure: Israel broke the Old Covenant much like we break New Year Resolutions. If we can see the differences we may be able to see our way forward with God in faithfulness and holiness.

1. Redemption

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord.

(verses 31-32)

The problem with the Old Covenant wasn’t with God. It was with God’s people. God didn’t break the Old Covenant. His people did. And it’s a tragedy, because of what the Old Covenant gave them. And the New Covenant cannot be inferior: it is better. It includes all the best that God gave in the Old Covenant and more.

In particular, the Old Covenant began with redemption. He ‘took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt’ (verse 32). Before anything else, God saved his people from the oppression of Egypt. The commands of his covenant were only ever given after they had been delivered. So the Ten Commandments are given at Sinai, after their salvation at the Red Sea. God’s commands are only ever to be obeyed in response to and gratitude for what he has done for us.

So even now, when God makes a New Covenant with his people, it will still at the bottom line include redemption – being set free. Whereas before it involved liberation from Egypt it would now include being set free from Babylon and in due course under Jesus Christ would involve redemption from sin.

And so that is where the New Covenant begins for us. It begins with the liberating news that Jesus Christ in his death on the Cross offers the forgiveness of sins to all who trust their lives to him. It is the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. It is what Matt Redman has recently dubbed ‘Beautiful News’. He says,

We live in a culture marked by bad news. You only need flick through the news channels for a few moments to be faced with all kinds of negative or alarming news. The wonderful thing about the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it’s an altogether different kind of message. It’s ‘beautiful news’, refreshing to the soul and full hope, joy and peace.

Beautiful news – redemption – is the beginning of God’s covenant relationship with us. It is what he offers to us in Christ before we ever do anything for him. Our covenant responsibility is to respond to this love and grace with grateful hearts who love to do the will of the One who has redeemed us at immense personal cost.

The danger is in the wrong kind of response, and I can think of two. One would be just to take redemption for granted and go on living the same selfish lives. That in essence is how Israel broke the Old Covenant. It is a response that does not truly receive what God has done for us.

The other danger would be to respond but in the feeble strength of our own human efforts. And that is where we need to move from Old Covenant to New Covenant. That is where New Covenant is better than Old. So if we move on to the second and third themes of God’s work in the Covenant that I want to reflect on I hope we’ll see how it’s possible to live in response to his gracious salvation.

2. Renewal

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

(verse 33)

The law of God within us, written on our hearts by God. What a contrast with the Old Covenant where the law of God was written externally on tablets of stone. Now the word is within. God is at work within his people. No longer is he working outside his people to bring salvation and declare his law; he is bringing his transforming power to work within his people.

And for this reason I call this aspect of the New Covenant ‘renewal’. In New Testament terms this is the work of the Holy Spirit. God not only redeems us in Christ and shows us the lifestyle that would please him as a response; he does more. His Spirit takes his word and puts it within us, making it part of us. It is no longer an external standard to be attained; it is part of what God is making us to be as he restores his image in us and makes us more like Christ.

Yes, here is the work of the Holy Spirit. That great twentieth century American saint A W Tozer used to say that the Spirit-filled life was not a deluxe form of Christianity for first-class Christian; it was the birthright of every Christian. Covenant Sunday is a day to remember that. Today is a day to say, ‘Come, Holy Spirit.’ Today is not a day to look back on past glories of previous spiritual mountain-top experiences and bask in sepia-tinted nostalgic light. Today is an occasion to take stock of where we are spiritually now. Whether we have known great past spiritual triumphs or whether we have never truly known the Spirit-filled life, on Covenant Sunday we all cry, ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill us with your presence as the Father promises in the New Covenant. Come fill us, because without you we cannot adequately respond to God’s gracious work of salvation in Christ. Come fill us, because we long to show our gratitude for the love of God with lives overflowing with divine love.’

Some find this offensive. It may offend their pride, but that is what the Gospel does. It offends our pride. Everything we do of worth in the Christian life is given to us by God. It is not from our own hand.

Others are offended, because an earlier spiritual experience is not enough. This was the criticism brought against the nineteenth century revivalist D L Moody, when he preached once on Ephesians 5:18, which says, ‘Be filled with the Spirit.’ Moody correctly pointed out that the original Greek implies a translation of ‘Continue to be filled with the Spirit.’

One vicar objected to Moody’s teaching. ‘Why do I need to be filled with the Spirit again when I received the Holy Spirit at conversion?’ he complained.

‘Because,’ said Moody, ‘I leak.’

And we leak, too. Covenant Sunday may well be an occasion when we are conscious of the leakage, and that we have not lived up to our promises of last year. This may be at the forefront of our minds as we come in confession. But the Spirit is promised in the New Covenant. The Spirit is promised so that we can make a pleasing offering to God. So let us ask for more of the Holy Spirit with confidence that the Father will delight in our prayer and answer.

3. Relationship

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

(verse 34)

In some Christian circles there is a lot of cheesy talk about the Gospel meaning that people can have ‘a personal relationship with Jesus Christ’. It can sound like the Beautiful News is reduced to a cosmic mateyness. But however crassly it can be presented it remains at the heart of the Gospel: the New Covenant invites us into a personal relationship with the Almighty. ‘No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord,’ says our text. All within the Covenant shall know the Lord.

What we are called into is not religion – a set of rules and rituals with a belief in the existence of God. We are called into a relationship. God is so intent on breaking down the barriers that he ‘will forgive [our] iniquity, and remember [our] sin no more.’ His Son went to the Cross that we might know him personally. He sent his Spirit so that we might live to please him and reflect Christ.

No, the New Covenant brings us into personal relationship with God where we know him. It is why each of us can approach him in prayer, thanks to the Cross. It is no longer true that prayer is the preserve of specialists. All have an audience with the King, thanks to Christ’s work. It is not simply that we talk to the Father but that he talks to us. We hear his word and respond. Preachers and Bible teachers may help in understanding that word, but there is no papacy of scholars who are the only ones truly to understand the divine message. It is open to all who put their faith in Christ and become his disciples.

How does that enable us to respond with greater fidelity to the challenges of entering into a covenant with God? Like this: it is a personal relationship because it is about love. Our response – as well as being enabled by the renewing power of the Holy Spirit – is also the response of relationship. It is the reply of love answering love.

So it isn’t the following of rules. It isn’t cold, deadly obligation. It’s an affair of the heart. A heart set free by divine redemption and renewed in the image of Christ by the Holy Spirit wants to express love, gratitude and devotion to the One who brought about redemption.

And that’s what we’re about today. What God has done in Christ is so immense, so universe-shattering that we are not interested in tired old New Year Resolutions. Our answer is the reply of Covenant to his Covenant. And he who has redeemed us makes it possible for us to do so. This is the New Covenant.

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Sermon, 4th Sunday In Advent: The Magnificat – Mary’s God

Luke 1:39-55

Introduction
When I was at Trinity
College, Bristol we had to go out on ‘preaching teams’, mostly to parish
churches. One member of the team would preach, the others would evaluate the
sermon and perhaps also take part in the service.

One Sunday we went to a very high Anglican church in Swindon. My friend John was to preach and we could just
about make him out at the front through the clouds of incense. I led the
intercessions and apparently later one of the church wardens complained about
me, because I didn’t pray for the Pope.

At the end of the service the leaders and the choir
processed out. The service was over, and we sat down. Or – we thought the
service had ended. Because just as we got settled, back came the vicar and a
few others. They stood in front of a plaster cast statue of Mary and began
singing to her. SingalongaMary, I irreverently called it.

And we have many reasons to be sceptical about the
specifically Catholic doctrines of Mary. The Immaculate Conception – that not
only was Mary a virgin she was also sinless has no warrant in Scripture.
Neither does the doctrine of her Assumption into Heaven. And nor does the
doctrine of her Perpetual Virginity, which makes it difficult to explain the
Gospel references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters without special pleading that they
weren’t siblings, they were cousins.

In Catholic worship we hear ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the
Lord is with thee’ – the words of Gabriel when he came to announce her
miraculous pregnancy. They are coupled with the words by which Elizabeth addresses her in
today’s passage – ‘Blessèd art thou among women and blessèd is the fruit of thy
womb’. These seem to be used to elevate Mary, perhaps even to make her the
dispenser of grace rather than the recipient of grace.

Worse, she is even referred to as ‘co-redemptrix’ with
Christ, making her prayers efficacious for salvation alongside Jesus and his
Cross. Anything that says you need to add to the work of Christ on the Cross
needs to be treated with huge suspicion.

Have I got it in for Catholics today? Yet even if I am
extremely unhappy with their approach to Mary I have also to say that
Protestants have been guilty of underplaying her importance in reaction. On
more than one occasion in the New Testament Mary is the model disciple of her
Son.

Here as she sings the Magnificat (even if the text is a
later development from what she originally said) she is the model for praise
and worship. Why? Because her praise of God is not marked by the ups and downs
of her feelings, but by rendering praise based on the character of God, as
shown in his actions. Mary’s song is one that tells us about the God she adores
and serves. Who is Mary’s God, then?

1. He Is The God Of Blessing
Elizabeth
has called Mary ‘blessed’, because of the child she carries (verse 42) and
because she believed in the word spoken to her (verse 45). Mary agrees she is
blessed – but will not accept praise for herself. She turns the praise towards
the God who has blessed her:

And Mary said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call
me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me

  
and holy is his name.’
(verses 46-49)

She is a lowly
servant – as a betrothed young Jewish woman she is between twelve and thirteen
years old. How remarkable it would have been then and is now that God should
use such a person. She has had questions when Gabriel appeared with the news,
but she has accepted it – even though she risked disgrace and possibly worse
when it would be known that she had become pregnant before marrying Joseph.
Whatever the cost, she knows she is blessed to be chosen by God for his
magnificent purposes.

Other translations say ‘afflicted’ rather than ‘lowliness’,
but it is hard to see how Mary is ‘afflicted’. Except in this sense. Mary is
not just speaking for herself, she is identifying with her people, God’s
people. They truly are ‘afflicted’. They, if you like, ‘lack a child’, the
Messiah. But now God is dealing with that affliction. The promised child is
coming. God is blessing Mary and his people.

It is said sometimes that with the suffering of the Jewish
people down the centuries some Jews have prayed something like this: ‘O Lord, I
know we are supposed to be your chosen people, but couldn’t you choose some
other people just once in a while?’

And perhaps we too lose sight of that privilege of being
chosen – chosen by God for wonderful purposes. When we find those purposes set
us down in a place we would rather not live, alongside people with whom we
would not naturally want to associate, in work we do not find congenial, we do
not tend to think of ourselves as blessed. But if the calling is to such
restricted or unappealing circumstances then that is where the blessing will
come. Jonah didn’t like the thought of going to Nineveh. He thought he knew better than God
and headed for Tarshish. But Nineveh
was his destiny. Nineveh
was where God used his preaching, even if Jonah didn’t enjoy the results as he
should have done.

So I am not merely talking about the sort of blessing that
consists in listing the material benefits God has given us (just as he has done
to many who do not acknowledge him). I am talking about the blessing of
following in his calling, the blessing of knowing you are chosen. If you know
that it can be turned into praise, just as Mary did, even though accepting her
call was a dangerous challenge.

2. He Is The God Of Mercy
Verse 50:

His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.

Afflicted and lowly people need mercy. That is what God is
giving me and my people through the child I am to bear, says Mary: mercy. It
might not have been what they first thought they needed: mercy is a gift to
those who are in the wrong. The convicted and condemned plead for mercy. That
is certainly not how the People of God saw themselves at this time.

But Mary brings us back to the age-old theme of God’s mercy.
It is ‘for those who fear him from generation to generation’. And it is the
reminder we need. We can forget our need of mercy. We can become self-righteous
– and with it, rather ugly people. Mary brings us back to our roots: mercy is
what brings us into the presence of God, nothing less. We do not swan into his
presence because we are decent people, we can only come because he has brought
us here.

On one occasion when I was in hospital there was another
Christian on the ward with me. Naturally we had a number of conversations. Just
before whichever one of us was going to be discharged first (I don’t remember
which of us it was) he gave me his card. After his name were the letters
‘SSBG’. I couldn’t think what university degree of professional qualification
that could be, so I asked him. ‘Sinner Saved By Grace’, he replied. It was his
constant reminder of who he was and where he had come from.

Similarly, another story from my time at Trinity College,
Bristol: I once
asked one of the lecturers about something that seemed to be an anomaly in the
Anglican Holy Communion service. The confession of sins was followed by the
‘absolution’ (assurance of God’s forgiveness) but then the next part of the
liturgy was the Gloria. That seemed fine at first – burst into praise after being
assured of forgiveness. But the Gloria asks Jesus to ‘have mercy on us’. So my
question was, why were we asking for mercy again immediately after we had been
assured of forgiveness? The lecturer replied, ‘Because we always need mercy.’

Mary reminds us that we should always be conscious of God’s
mercy. When we do, we praise him more fittingly – more humbly.

3. He Is The God Of Holy Power
Verses 51 to 55:

He has shown strength with
his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
   in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.

Ah, Christmas! Warm, gooey feelings, a newborn baby to cluck
over, a proud young mother and her loyal husband. Cute, isn’t it?

But what if that expectant mother says that the event is political?
Knowing that she is bringing the Messiah into the world she looks back at God’s
previous deeds of holy power. He has raised up his lowly and hungry servant
people and overthrown the rich and powerful. And why would she reflect on this
unless she had a prophetic expectation that her son would do the same and more?

In Mary’s day that would have been easy to interpret in
terms of Israel’s
national hopes under the oppression of the Romans. But by the time Luke wrote
his Gospel these hopes had been crushed. Instead I think he wants us to see
Mary’s worship of this God of holy power, this God who works in history on
behalf of the poor and oppressed, in terms of Jesus’ adult ministry.

The Christmas message, then, is one about a God of justice
who has not ignored the evil in the world. He does not remain aloof and
unconcerned in heaven. He has done something about it. The difference is, he
does not fight wickedness with the conventional weapons of force and
destruction. It is holy power, not
unholy power.  He knows that only a more
costly and sacrificial way will conquer sin. It is the way of humility and
suffering. In God’s kingdom, evil is toppled in the most surprising ways. Let
us remember that as we pray, campaign and act.

4. He Is The God Of Salvation
This is the reverse side of what I have just said. Not only
does God act in holy power to bring down wickedness, he also acts to save his
downtrodden people. He hears the cries of his faithful followers down the ages
as they join in the chorus, ‘How long, O Lord?’ In response to prayer he brings
down empires and dismantles Iron Curtains.

During the hard times he gives his suffering people
sustenance as they wait for their day of salvation. It may be through biblical
books like Revelation, which was written for persecuted Christians, through
courageous leaders and through support from brother and sister believers living
under less restricted circumstances.

Today, I believe, he hears the cries of Christians in the
Middle East who are suffering
persecution because of the US and UK policy in Iraq. They are being
targeted by Muslim extremists as supporters of Western policies. Right now it
is happening in Iraq and in Bethlehem.

Within Chelmsford,
talk to my old college friend the Revd Mones Farah, the Anglican priest in
charge at the Meadgate Church
Centre in Great Baddow. I first met Mones twenty years ago. He is a
Palestinian Christian from a small town you may just have heard of – Nazareth. He talked about
his experiences in college chapel once. He said that to be a Palestinian
Christian in Israel
was to be a third class citizen: as an Arab you were second class compared with
Jewish citizens, and within the Arab community you were inferior to the
Muslims. That was how he felt in the 1980s; just imagine how it must be now
with an Israeli wall, the election of Hamas and naïve Western imperial
assumptions that Arab culture will welcome liberal democracy with open arms
when soldiers land. No wonder there has been a Christian exodus from the Holy Land
and Iraq.

But even if Bush and Blair are not listening, Mary’s God is.
He hears the cries of Arab Christians, just as he saw the tears of Christians
under Soviet communism. And he is the God of salvation. He will act. But he
calls us into partnership with him in prayer, lobbying, advocacy, support and
action. If we believe in the God whom Mary praised, then surely such
partnership with the God of salvation will be part of our worship.

Why is why, after the next hymn, we shall turn to prayer.

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Sermon, 4th Sunday In Advent: The Magnificat – Mary’s God

Luke 1:39-55

Introduction
When I was at Trinity
College, Bristol we had to go out on ‘preaching teams’, mostly to parish
churches. One member of the team would preach, the others would evaluate the
sermon and perhaps also take part in the service.

One Sunday we went to a very high Anglican church in Swindon. My friend John was to preach and we could just
about make him out at the front through the clouds of incense. I led the
intercessions and apparently later one of the church wardens complained about
me, because I didn’t pray for the Pope.

At the end of the service the leaders and the choir
processed out. The service was over, and we sat down. Or – we thought the
service had ended. Because just as we got settled, back came the vicar and a
few others. They stood in front of a plaster cast statue of Mary and began
singing to her. SingalongaMary, I irreverently called it.

And we have many reasons to be sceptical about the
specifically Catholic doctrines of Mary. The Immaculate Conception – that not
only was Mary a virgin she was also sinless has no warrant in Scripture.
Neither does the doctrine of her Assumption into Heaven. And nor does the
doctrine of her Perpetual Virginity, which makes it difficult to explain the
Gospel references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters without special pleading that they
weren’t siblings, they were cousins.

In Catholic worship we hear ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the
Lord is with thee’ – the words of Gabriel when he came to announce her
miraculous pregnancy. They are coupled with the words by which Elizabeth addresses her in
today’s passage – ‘Blessèd art thou among women and blessèd is the fruit of thy
womb’. These seem to be used to elevate Mary, perhaps even to make her the
dispenser of grace rather than the recipient of grace.

Worse, she is even referred to as ‘co-redemptrix’ with
Christ, making her prayers efficacious for salvation alongside Jesus and his
Cross. Anything that says you need to add to the work of Christ on the Cross
needs to be treated with huge suspicion.

Have I got it in for Catholics today? Yet even if I am
extremely unhappy with their approach to Mary I have also to say that
Protestants have been guilty of underplaying her importance in reaction. On
more than one occasion in the New Testament Mary is the model disciple of her
Son.

Here as she sings the Magnificat (even if the text is a
later development from what she originally said) she is the model for praise
and worship. Why? Because her praise of God is not marked by the ups and downs
of her feelings, but by rendering praise based on the character of God, as
shown in his actions. Mary’s song is one that tells us about the God she adores
and serves. Who is Mary’s God, then?

1. He Is The God Of Blessing
Elizabeth
has called Mary ‘blessed’, because of the child she carries (verse 42) and
because she believed in the word spoken to her (verse 45). Mary agrees she is
blessed – but will not accept praise for herself. She turns the praise towards
the God who has blessed her:

And Mary said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
   and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
   Surely, from now on all generations will call
me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me

  
and holy is his name.’
(verses 46-49)

She is a lowly
servant – as a betrothed young Jewish woman she is between twelve and thirteen
years old. How remarkable it would have been then and is now that God should
use such a person. She has had questions when Gabriel appeared with the news,
but she has accepted it – even though she risked disgrace and possibly worse
when it would be known that she had become pregnant before marrying Joseph.
Whatever the cost, she knows she is blessed to be chosen by God for his
magnificent purposes.

Other translations say ‘afflicted’ rather than ‘lowliness’,
but it is hard to see how Mary is ‘afflicted’. Except in this sense. Mary is
not just speaking for herself, she is identifying with her people, God’s
people. They truly are ‘afflicted’. They, if you like, ‘lack a child’, the
Messiah. But now God is dealing with that affliction. The promised child is
coming. God is blessing Mary and his people.

It is said sometimes that with the suffering of the Jewish
people down the centuries some Jews have prayed something like this: ‘O Lord, I
know we are supposed to be your chosen people, but couldn’t you choose some
other people just once in a while?’

And perhaps we too lose sight of that privilege of being
chosen – chosen by God for wonderful purposes. When we find those purposes set
us down in a place we would rather not live, alongside people with whom we
would not naturally want to associate, in work we do not find congenial, we do
not tend to think of ourselves as blessed. But if the calling is to such
restricted or unappealing circumstances then that is where the blessing will
come. Jonah didn’t like the thought of going to Nineveh. He thought he knew better than God
and headed for Tarshish. But Nineveh
was his destiny. Nineveh
was where God used his preaching, even if Jonah didn’t enjoy the results as he
should have done.

So I am not merely talking about the sort of blessing that
consists in listing the material benefits God has given us (just as he has done
to many who do not acknowledge him). I am talking about the blessing of
following in his calling, the blessing of knowing you are chosen. If you know
that it can be turned into praise, just as Mary did, even though accepting her
call was a dangerous challenge.

2. He Is The God Of Mercy
Verse 50:

His mercy is for those who fear him
   from generation to generation.

Afflicted and lowly people need mercy. That is what God is
giving me and my people through the child I am to bear, says Mary: mercy. It
might not have been what they first thought they needed: mercy is a gift to
those who are in the wrong. The convicted and condemned plead for mercy. That
is certainly not how the People of God saw themselves at this time.

But Mary brings us back to the age-old theme of God’s mercy.
It is ‘for those who fear him from generation to generation’. And it is the
reminder we need. We can forget our need of mercy. We can become self-righteous
– and with it, rather ugly people. Mary brings us back to our roots: mercy is
what brings us into the presence of God, nothing less. We do not swan into his
presence because we are decent people, we can only come because he has brought
us here.

On one occasion when I was in hospital there was another
Christian on the ward with me. Naturally we had a number of conversations. Just
before whichever one of us was going to be discharged first (I don’t remember
which of us it was) he gave me his card. After his name were the letters
‘SSBG’. I couldn’t think what university degree of professional qualification
that could be, so I asked him. ‘Sinner Saved By Grace’, he replied. It was his
constant reminder of who he was and where he had come from.

Similarly, another story from my time at Trinity College,
Bristol: I once
asked one of the lecturers about something that seemed to be an anomaly in the
Anglican Holy Communion service. The confession of sins was followed by the
‘absolution’ (assurance of God’s forgiveness) but then the next part of the
liturgy was the Gloria. That seemed fine at first – burst into praise after being
assured of forgiveness. But the Gloria asks Jesus to ‘have mercy on us’. So my
question was, why were we asking for mercy again immediately after we had been
assured of forgiveness? The lecturer replied, ‘Because we always need mercy.’

Mary reminds us that we should always be conscious of God’s
mercy. When we do, we praise him more fittingly – more humbly.

3. He Is The God Of Holy Power
Verses 51 to 55:

He has shown strength with
his arm;
   he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
   in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.

Ah, Christmas! Warm, gooey feelings, a newborn baby to cluck
over, a proud young mother and her loyal husband. Cute, isn’t it?

But what if that expectant mother says that the event is political?
Knowing that she is bringing the Messiah into the world she looks back at God’s
previous deeds of holy power. He has raised up his lowly and hungry servant
people and overthrown the rich and powerful. And why would she reflect on this
unless she had a prophetic expectation that her son would do the same and more?

In Mary’s day that would have been easy to interpret in
terms of Israel’s
national hopes under the oppression of the Romans. But by the time Luke wrote
his Gospel these hopes had been crushed. Instead I think he wants us to see
Mary’s worship of this God of holy power, this God who works in history on
behalf of the poor and oppressed, in terms of Jesus’ adult ministry.

The Christmas message, then, is one about a God of justice
who has not ignored the evil in the world. He does not remain aloof and
unconcerned in heaven. He has done something about it. The difference is, he
does not fight wickedness with the conventional weapons of force and
destruction. It is holy power, not
unholy power.  He knows that only a more
costly and sacrificial way will conquer sin. It is the way of humility and
suffering. In God’s kingdom, evil is toppled in the most surprising ways. Let
us remember that as we pray, campaign and act.

4. He Is The God Of Salvation
This is the reverse side of what I have just said. Not only
does God act in holy power to bring down wickedness, he also acts to save his
downtrodden people. He hears the cries of his faithful followers down the ages
as they join in the chorus, ‘How long, O Lord?’ In response to prayer he brings
down empires and dismantles Iron Curtains.

During the hard times he gives his suffering people
sustenance as they wait for their day of salvation. It may be through biblical
books like Revelation, which was written for persecuted Christians, through
courageous leaders and through support from brother and sister believers living
under less restricted circumstances.

Today, I believe, he hears the cries of Christians in the
Middle East who are suffering
persecution because of the US and UK policy in Iraq. They are being
targeted by Muslim extremists as supporters of Western policies. Right now it
is happening in Iraq and in Bethlehem.

Within Chelmsford,
talk to my old college friend the Revd Mones Farah, the Anglican priest in
charge at the Meadgate Church
Centre in Great Baddow. I first met Mones twenty years ago. He is a
Palestinian Christian from a small town you may just have heard of – Nazareth. He talked about
his experiences in college chapel once. He said that to be a Palestinian
Christian in Israel
was to be a third class citizen: as an Arab you were second class compared with
Jewish citizens, and within the Arab community you were inferior to the
Muslims. That was how he felt in the 1980s; just imagine how it must be now
with an Israeli wall, the election of Hamas and naïve Western imperial
assumptions that Arab culture will welcome liberal democracy with open arms
when soldiers land. No wonder there has been a Christian exodus from the Holy Land
and Iraq.

But even if Bush and Blair are not listening, Mary’s God is.
He hears the cries of Arab Christians, just as he saw the tears of Christians
under Soviet communism. And he is the God of salvation. He will act. But he
calls us into partnership with him in prayer, lobbying, advocacy, support and
action. If we believe in the God whom Mary praised, then surely such
partnership with the God of salvation will be part of our worship.

Why is why, after the next hymn, we shall turn to prayer.

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0

Evening Sermon For Christmas Eve: The Supremacy Of Christ

Well, I still don’t quite have myself together health-wise. I’ve gone from one virus to a cold, but I am still getting the headaches that wake me in the night. Both my GP and my osteopath think they are stress-related. I have some things to examine in my life as a result. In particular it seems that spiritually there is a lot of giving out and very little opportunity to receive, and this has depleted my adrenal glands.

So – sob story over – I’ve decided to cut some corners in preparation for my remaining Christmas services. (I have three on Christmas Eve and two on Christmas Day.) For the evening one (NB not a midnight one, thankfully) I’ve dusted down and adapted a sermon from three years ago on the same Lectionary passage,a nd redaction critics will see clear evidence of this in the Introduction. There is some virtue in keeping your old sermons. In fact one old minister of mine only ever got out old sermons and worked them over, because he felt that if he couldn’t improve an old sermon there was something wrong with him.

This, then, is what I have come up with. It’s an attempt to show how unique and supreme Jesus Christ seen in the Incarnation is when compared with other faiths. But I hope I have not done it in too much of a triumphalist tone.

Hebrews 1:1-4 NRSV
NIV

Introduction
At this time of year we hear more and more stories of
‘politically correct’ attempts to excise Jesus from Christmas. Three years ago Buckinghamshire County Council banned
Christian Christmas cards and in the same year the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s
official Christmas card contained Muslim and Hindu images but no Christian
ones.

How refreshing, then, this year, to hear that in the United
States, Wal-Mart (not a company for which
I usually have any great affection) is allowing its staff to greet customers
with the words ‘Merry Christmas’ rather than the usual ‘Happy Holidays’.

Without in any way wishing to be one of those miserable
Christians who want to condemn everything about the way Christmas is
celebrated, I nevertheless want to say that this season is one particular time
for affirming the supremacy of Jesus Christ. It’s something the writer to the
Hebrews lays out clearly in the first four verses of his epistle.

He is writing to a group of early Christians who are under
pressure to renounce or dilute their faith. They come from a Jewish background
and are being pressed to return purely to Judaism. So the writer sets out to
show them why he believes they shouldn’t retract their confession of Christ.
And in a nutshell his big reason for doing so is – Jesus. There is no-one else
like him. No-one can compare, no other faith can compare.

And in that respect his writings become particularly
relevant to us. We live in a multi-cultural society – that is simply a
description of fact – but the pressure is on us to see all faiths as more or
less the same. And without resorting to the ‘crusade’ mentality of previous
generations of Christians it is still our call to maintain our loyalty to
Christ, because there truly is no-one like him. Let me set out for you four
ways in these four verses from Hebrews that we see the supremacy of Christ. I
pray they may they be reasons that inspire our worship as we celebrate his
coming, and give firmer foundations to our faith in challenging days.

1. The Supremacy Of
The Son In Revelation
Verses 1 – 2a:

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in
many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to
us by a Son

These few words distinguish the Christian faith from several
others today. They make us different from the Mormon faith, which requires its
believers to follow the Book of Mormon which Joseph Smith claimed to have
received from an angel called Moroni.
But God has spoken to us by his Son: there is a finality about Jesus Christ
because of who he is. And one thing it means is we close the canon of
Scripture. The New Testament writings, being either from apostles or close
associates, are where Holy Writ ends. God still speaks – of course – but all is
to be tested by Scripture, because Jesus has brought a climax to the Bible.

These words also distinguish us from our Muslim friends,
because the Son is clearly greater than the prophets. Muslims claim that Jesus
is a prophet but not the Son of God. And even then their basic creed is to say,
‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet’. Islam explicitly says,
‘God has no son’, but the Gospel contradicts this. God has a Son, and he is the
climax of revelation.

Then these words show that the Christian faith is in
continuity with the Old Testament, but Christ is its fulfilment. That
differentiates us from the Jewish faith, which is the foundation of
Christianity. But our confession is that the coming of Christ fulfils all the
messianic hopes, even if they are in a very different shape from original
expectations.

At Christmas we celebrate the fact that a helpless, crying
baby is God’s ultimate word to us.

2. The Supremacy Of
The Son Over Creation
Verses 2b-3a:

whom he appointed heir of all things,
through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory
and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his
powerful word.

If Jesus is the ‘heir of all things’, then creation belongs
to him. It’s his inheritance. And therefore creation is not a part of God, nor
is God a part of creation, as our Hindu neighbours would believe. Rather, Jesus
Christ is the Lord of creation.

And if God ‘also created the worlds’ through him, then this
supports other New Testament texts in John and Colossians that teach that Jesus
pre-existed creation with the Father. So the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who follow an
ancient heretic called Arius, in affirming ‘there was a time when he was not’,
are also wrong. The Jehovah’s Witnesses think that biblical descriptions of
Jesus such as ‘Son’ and ‘first-born’ mean he is a created being. But this is
never the meaning in the context: they are terms that teach his supremacy.

‘He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint
of God’s very being’: hence Jesus in adult life was to tell his disciples, ‘If
you have seen me, you have seen the Father’. So our Christmas confession is
that at this season we do indeed see God – lying in a manger.

‘And he sustains all things by his powerful word’ – this is
far from the ancient myth of Atlas with the world on his shoulders: this is an
active, ongoing and dynamic. There are those around who would say with the
Australian singer Nick
Cave, ‘I don’t believe in
an interventionist God’. They believe there is a God but not that he is at work
in the world. In the eighteenth century some of these opposed Wesley: they were
called Deists. But we believe in a Christ who is involved in his world. And
never more so than in the humility of the Incarnation.

There is a beautiful irony in the birth of Jesus: he is
dependent upon Mary for his nurture and well-being, but she, like everyone, is
dependent upon him for existence. This is a Lord to worship.

3. The Supremacy Of
The Son In Redemption
Verse 3b:

When he had made purification for sins,
he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high

‘When he had made purification for sins’ – sin is the human
predicament. This is why Jesus came. It is why he came as fully divine and
fully human, to reconcile God and humankind. Only he can resolve it. Any
philosophy or faith that says we need to put it all right ourselves is doomed
to failure. And so you get eastern faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism looking
for people to behave better in each successive incarnation, only to be plunged
into a hopeless ongoing cycle of rebirths as one creature or another. It is a
counsel of despair. The Good News of Christmas is that Christ came to deal with
this problem. The weight is off us. He came to take it, to bear our burdens in
his life and supremely on the Cross. That is why we joyfully sing,

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,

            He
sets the prisoner free.

His blood can make the foulest clean,

            His
blood availed for me.

(Charles Wesley, 1707-1788)

And ‘when he had made purification for sins,’ our writer
adds, ‘he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high’. He sat down.
Don’t you get a sense of satisfaction and completeness when you have finished a
job and sit down? So it is with Jesus. It is all done, there is nothing to add,
nothing has been missed out and salvation is complete. Now Heaven and God’s
Kingdom awaits his people, with the resurrection of the dead to a transformed
physical existence in the presence of God. It is nothing like the Buddhist
belief in nirvana, where all our cravings end, there are no more rebirths and
we become absorbed into the great nothingness. There is no great nothingness
for the followers of Jesus. Instead there is the new heaven and the new earth,
all secured for us by Christ who came for us, died for us, rose for us and is
ascended for us.

Truly in the Incarnation Jesus was born not only to live but
also to die. Mary was told that a sword would pierce her own heart and she
would watch her Son be crucified – but she would become one of his followers. The
road to Bethlehem leads inexorably for the
Christian to Calvary. We cannot look at the
crib without looking at the Cross. Jesus embraced this in the Incarnation.

4. The Supremacy Of
Christ Over History
Verse 4:

having become as much superior to
angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Go away from the great classic religions to some of the new
religious movements and you will find a burgeoning interest in angels. The old
notion of ‘guardian angel’, which as far as I can tell is nowhere to be found
in Scripture, has been souped up. People believe that everyone has their
personal angel. Some believe they have been assured of the presence of an angel
with them by a feather having been left behind. Many expect to have visions of
angels, but rather than the biblical visions of angels where these messengers
of God point people Godwards, they just get a little bit of comfort and
spiritual mollycoddling.

Sometimes we find similar beliefs in the church. I had a
church member once who believed that your guardian angel accompanied you in or
on your car, but if you exceeded the speed limit the angel deserted you to any
consequences.

The writer to the Hebrews also faced a contemporary interest
in angels, but in a different way. And like him we can say, why go to the
angels when you can go to someone superior? Not to be dismissive of angels,
especially at Christmas when they feature so significantly in the birth
stories, but why get obsessed with them when Jesus is superior? The angels are
not divine: Jesus is. No angel took on human flesh for the salvation of the
world: Jesus did. No angel received the Father’s vindication of their mission
in the way that Jesus did for his: ‘the name he has inherited is more excellent
than theirs.’

In Jesus, God has done something greater than anything else
in history. His work in Jesus is unique. The incarnation and redemption are
unrepeatable. Here is where history turns. However we look at the problem of
evil in creation, this is the point of God’s decisive world-changing act.

Conclusion
So why go through all this? Hasn’t the world had enough of
Christians (or people of other faiths, for that matter) who have a smug
superiority and who use that feeling to tread other people down? Shouldn’t we
be listening to those who call for peace, tolerance and dialogue among the
religions? Shouldn’t we just live and let live?

Certainly there is much to be ashamed of in the history of
religion and of Christianity. But the Incarnation gives us the clue as to how
we should respond. Did Jesus come with violence and coercion to force people to
follow him? Quite the opposite. He came in weakness and in humility. That same
Incarnation which shows us the uniqueness and superiority of Jesus Christ which
we cannot negotiate away without betraying him also shows us the gentle and
gracious way in which we firmly, lovingly and winsomely hold to our faith in
him as we swim against the tide in our culture.

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0

Evening Sermon For Christmas Eve: The Supremacy Of Christ

Well, I still don’t quite have myself together health-wise. I’ve gone from one virus to a cold, but I am still getting the headaches that wake me in the night. Both my GP and my osteopath think they are stress-related. I have some things to examine in my life as a result. In particular it seems that spiritually there is a lot of giving out and very little opportunity to receive, and this has depleted my adrenal glands.

So – sob story over – I’ve decided to cut some corners in preparation for my remaining Christmas services. (I have three on Christmas Eve and two on Christmas Day.) For the evening one (NB not a midnight one, thankfully) I’ve dusted down and adapted a sermon from three years ago on the same Lectionary passage,a nd redaction critics will see clear evidence of this in the Introduction. There is some virtue in keeping your old sermons. In fact one old minister of mine only ever got out old sermons and worked them over, because he felt that if he couldn’t improve an old sermon there was something wrong with him.

This, then, is what I have come up with. It’s an attempt to show how unique and supreme Jesus Christ seen in the Incarnation is when compared with other faiths. But I hope I have not done it in too much of a triumphalist tone.

Hebrews 1:1-4 NRSV
NIV

Introduction
At this time of year we hear more and more stories of
‘politically correct’ attempts to excise Jesus from Christmas. Three years ago Buckinghamshire County Council banned
Christian Christmas cards and in the same year the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s
official Christmas card contained Muslim and Hindu images but no Christian
ones.

How refreshing, then, this year, to hear that in the United
States, Wal-Mart (not a company for which
I usually have any great affection) is allowing its staff to greet customers
with the words ‘Merry Christmas’ rather than the usual ‘Happy Holidays’.

Without in any way wishing to be one of those miserable
Christians who want to condemn everything about the way Christmas is
celebrated, I nevertheless want to say that this season is one particular time
for affirming the supremacy of Jesus Christ. It’s something the writer to the
Hebrews lays out clearly in the first four verses of his epistle.

He is writing to a group of early Christians who are under
pressure to renounce or dilute their faith. They come from a Jewish background
and are being pressed to return purely to Judaism. So the writer sets out to
show them why he believes they shouldn’t retract their confession of Christ.
And in a nutshell his big reason for doing so is – Jesus. There is no-one else
like him. No-one can compare, no other faith can compare.

And in that respect his writings become particularly
relevant to us. We live in a multi-cultural society – that is simply a
description of fact – but the pressure is on us to see all faiths as more or
less the same. And without resorting to the ‘crusade’ mentality of previous
generations of Christians it is still our call to maintain our loyalty to
Christ, because there truly is no-one like him. Let me set out for you four
ways in these four verses from Hebrews that we see the supremacy of Christ. I
pray they may they be reasons that inspire our worship as we celebrate his
coming, and give firmer foundations to our faith in challenging days.

1. The Supremacy Of
The Son In Revelation
Verses 1 – 2a:

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in
many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to
us by a Son

These few words distinguish the Christian faith from several
others today. They make us different from the Mormon faith, which requires its
believers to follow the Book of Mormon which Joseph Smith claimed to have
received from an angel called Moroni.
But God has spoken to us by his Son: there is a finality about Jesus Christ
because of who he is. And one thing it means is we close the canon of
Scripture. The New Testament writings, being either from apostles or close
associates, are where Holy Writ ends. God still speaks – of course – but all is
to be tested by Scripture, because Jesus has brought a climax to the Bible.

These words also distinguish us from our Muslim friends,
because the Son is clearly greater than the prophets. Muslims claim that Jesus
is a prophet but not the Son of God. And even then their basic creed is to say,
‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet’. Islam explicitly says,
‘God has no son’, but the Gospel contradicts this. God has a Son, and he is the
climax of revelation.

Then these words show that the Christian faith is in
continuity with the Old Testament, but Christ is its fulfilment. That
differentiates us from the Jewish faith, which is the foundation of
Christianity. But our confession is that the coming of Christ fulfils all the
messianic hopes, even if they are in a very different shape from original
expectations.

At Christmas we celebrate the fact that a helpless, crying
baby is God’s ultimate word to us.

2. The Supremacy Of
The Son Over Creation
Verses 2b-3a:

whom he appointed heir of all things,
through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory
and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his
powerful word.

If Jesus is the ‘heir of all things’, then creation belongs
to him. It’s his inheritance. And therefore creation is not a part of God, nor
is God a part of creation, as our Hindu neighbours would believe. Rather, Jesus
Christ is the Lord of creation.

And if God ‘also created the worlds’ through him, then this
supports other New Testament texts in John and Colossians that teach that Jesus
pre-existed creation with the Father. So the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who follow an
ancient heretic called Arius, in affirming ‘there was a time when he was not’,
are also wrong. The Jehovah’s Witnesses think that biblical descriptions of
Jesus such as ‘Son’ and ‘first-born’ mean he is a created being. But this is
never the meaning in the context: they are terms that teach his supremacy.

‘He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint
of God’s very being’: hence Jesus in adult life was to tell his disciples, ‘If
you have seen me, you have seen the Father’. So our Christmas confession is
that at this season we do indeed see God – lying in a manger.

‘And he sustains all things by his powerful word’ – this is
far from the ancient myth of Atlas with the world on his shoulders: this is an
active, ongoing and dynamic. There are those around who would say with the
Australian singer Nick
Cave, ‘I don’t believe in
an interventionist God’. They believe there is a God but not that he is at work
in the world. In the eighteenth century some of these opposed Wesley: they were
called Deists. But we believe in a Christ who is involved in his world. And
never more so than in the humility of the Incarnation.

There is a beautiful irony in the birth of Jesus: he is
dependent upon Mary for his nurture and well-being, but she, like everyone, is
dependent upon him for existence. This is a Lord to worship.

3. The Supremacy Of
The Son In Redemption
Verse 3b:

When he had made purification for sins,
he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high

‘When he had made purification for sins’ – sin is the human
predicament. This is why Jesus came. It is why he came as fully divine and
fully human, to reconcile God and humankind. Only he can resolve it. Any
philosophy or faith that says we need to put it all right ourselves is doomed
to failure. And so you get eastern faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism looking
for people to behave better in each successive incarnation, only to be plunged
into a hopeless ongoing cycle of rebirths as one creature or another. It is a
counsel of despair. The Good News of Christmas is that Christ came to deal with
this problem. The weight is off us. He came to take it, to bear our burdens in
his life and supremely on the Cross. That is why we joyfully sing,

He breaks the power of cancelled sin,

            He
sets the prisoner free.

His blood can make the foulest clean,

            His
blood availed for me.

(Charles Wesley, 1707-1788)

And ‘when he had made purification for sins,’ our writer
adds, ‘he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high’. He sat down.
Don’t you get a sense of satisfaction and completeness when you have finished a
job and sit down? So it is with Jesus. It is all done, there is nothing to add,
nothing has been missed out and salvation is complete. Now Heaven and God’s
Kingdom awaits his people, with the resurrection of the dead to a transformed
physical existence in the presence of God. It is nothing like the Buddhist
belief in nirvana, where all our cravings end, there are no more rebirths and
we become absorbed into the great nothingness. There is no great nothingness
for the followers of Jesus. Instead there is the new heaven and the new earth,
all secured for us by Christ who came for us, died for us, rose for us and is
ascended for us.

Truly in the Incarnation Jesus was born not only to live but
also to die. Mary was told that a sword would pierce her own heart and she
would watch her Son be crucified – but she would become one of his followers. The
road to Bethlehem leads inexorably for the
Christian to Calvary. We cannot look at the
crib without looking at the Cross. Jesus embraced this in the Incarnation.

4. The Supremacy Of
Christ Over History
Verse 4:

having become as much superior to
angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

Go away from the great classic religions to some of the new
religious movements and you will find a burgeoning interest in angels. The old
notion of ‘guardian angel’, which as far as I can tell is nowhere to be found
in Scripture, has been souped up. People believe that everyone has their
personal angel. Some believe they have been assured of the presence of an angel
with them by a feather having been left behind. Many expect to have visions of
angels, but rather than the biblical visions of angels where these messengers
of God point people Godwards, they just get a little bit of comfort and
spiritual mollycoddling.

Sometimes we find similar beliefs in the church. I had a
church member once who believed that your guardian angel accompanied you in or
on your car, but if you exceeded the speed limit the angel deserted you to any
consequences.

The writer to the Hebrews also faced a contemporary interest
in angels, but in a different way. And like him we can say, why go to the
angels when you can go to someone superior? Not to be dismissive of angels,
especially at Christmas when they feature so significantly in the birth
stories, but why get obsessed with them when Jesus is superior? The angels are
not divine: Jesus is. No angel took on human flesh for the salvation of the
world: Jesus did. No angel received the Father’s vindication of their mission
in the way that Jesus did for his: ‘the name he has inherited is more excellent
than theirs.’

In Jesus, God has done something greater than anything else
in history. His work in Jesus is unique. The incarnation and redemption are
unrepeatable. Here is where history turns. However we look at the problem of
evil in creation, this is the point of God’s decisive world-changing act.

Conclusion
So why go through all this? Hasn’t the world had enough of
Christians (or people of other faiths, for that matter) who have a smug
superiority and who use that feeling to tread other people down? Shouldn’t we
be listening to those who call for peace, tolerance and dialogue among the
religions? Shouldn’t we just live and let live?

Certainly there is much to be ashamed of in the history of
religion and of Christianity. But the Incarnation gives us the clue as to how
we should respond. Did Jesus come with violence and coercion to force people to
follow him? Quite the opposite. He came in weakness and in humility. That same
Incarnation which shows us the uniqueness and superiority of Jesus Christ which
we cannot negotiate away without betraying him also shows us the gentle and
gracious way in which we firmly, lovingly and winsomely hold to our faith in
him as we swim against the tide in our culture.

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Christingle Glowsticks At Chelmsford Cathedral

As has been reported elsewhere,Chelmsford Cathedral is putting glowsticks rather than candles in its Christingle oranges this year. (See Dave Walker’s cartoon.) Local and nearby MPs have lined up to criticise, e.g., these words from Eric Pickles (Conservative, Brentwood and Ongar):

Eventually they will work out a way to take all the fun out of
Christmas. I think Christmas is becoming homogenised, dull and full of
earnestness. I would be interested to hear from the cathedral when was
the last time an orange and a candle set fire to a child’s hair.

The local MP in whose constituency the cathedral falls, Simon Burns (Conservative, Chelmsford West), told the Chelmsford Weekly News:

I think it is political correctness gone wild – my children frequently attended the Christingle service when they were younger. And while I was there never
once did I fear for the safety of my
children or the other children there
so I think the decision is rather sad.

That same paper is inviting correspondence on whether this is ‘political correctness gone mad’ and you can click at the bottom of the above link to give your opinion.

For me this is nothing of the sort. Churches and other public bodies are being forced by insurers and charity law to conduct more and more risk assessments that lead to decisions like this. And why is that? Because we have an ‘if it moves, sue it’ culture. The cause, then, is not political correctness but a culture that has rejected the message of forgiveness that Jesus taught and embodied.

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Christingle Glowsticks At Chelmsford Cathedral

As has been reported elsewhere,Chelmsford Cathedral is putting glowsticks rather than candles in its Christingle oranges this year. (See Dave Walker’s cartoon.) Local and nearby MPs have lined up to criticise, e.g., these words from Eric Pickles (Conservative, Brentwood and Ongar):

Eventually they will work out a way to take all the fun out of
Christmas. I think Christmas is becoming homogenised, dull and full of
earnestness. I would be interested to hear from the cathedral when was
the last time an orange and a candle set fire to a child’s hair.

The local MP in whose constituency the cathedral falls, Simon Burns (Conservative, Chelmsford West), told the Chelmsford Weekly News:

I think it is political correctness gone wild – my children frequently attended the Christingle service when they were younger. And while I was there never
once did I fear for the safety of my
children or the other children there
so I think the decision is rather sad.

That same paper is inviting correspondence on whether this is ‘political correctness gone mad’ and you can click at the bottom of the above link to give your opinion.

For me this is nothing of the sort. Churches and other public bodies are being forced by insurers and charity law to conduct more and more risk assessments that lead to decisions like this. And why is that? Because we have an ‘if it moves, sue it’ culture. The cause, then, is not political correctness but a culture that has rejected the message of forgiveness that Jesus taught and embodied.

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